


Blanco; Party of One

by Ladytalon



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Humor, Masturbation, Pre-Relationship, Sexual Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 12:47:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15558030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladytalon/pseuds/Ladytalon
Summary: It’s not as if helikesher or anything, he just has a very….active…imagination.





	Blanco; Party of One

There's nothing quite so satisfying as hearing the squelching noise of a skag being pulped under your tires, Zed thinks to himself as he drives up to Fyrestone’s gates. Too bad it’s such hell on the paintwork. The Outrunner idles as he gets out to unlock the chain holding the opening mechanism from being tampered with, and Zed pauses to listen for any crazed babbling. “No midgets today, then,” he says aloud, waiting for the gate to cycle open before driving in. It closes behind him and Zed makes sure to lock it up again before parking the ‘runner up on the blocks. It’s not ideal, but he can get to it easily enough if there’s trouble and he needs to head out quickly.

Trouble is something that surely isn’t in short supply these days, even after the departure of Nine Toes from the land of the living. Zed takes a moment to relish it because he doesn’t think the satisfaction from knowing that bastard is gone for good will _ever_ get old. “Money well spent,” he says despite knowing there’s nobody around to hear him, cocking his head to listen to the silence. The only things he can hear are the faint roars of the skags out by T.K. Baha’s shack, and the rattle of metal against metal as the wind moves it around. It doesn't look like any of Bonehead’s crew have slunk back to their camp, either, so it’s shaping up to be a _very_ good day.

Zed stands in front of his home and puts his hands on his hips, sighing in contentment. He’d been caught up with a few patients out by Tundra Express and hadn’t been able to get back until now – the complete and utter lack of idiots is good for the soul. Since he splits his time between the clinics found in Sanctuary and T-Bone Junction, Zed runs across his fair share of them. Some might say that his preference for solitude is what causes him to deem other people morons with such regularity, but he doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks of him. It’d been useful back when he still had a license, sure…now people come to him because there’s literally nowhere else to go and it’s not like he goes around actually _telling_ everyone what he thinks about their life choices. He keeps to himself and that’s just fine.

Too bad that certain _other_ people can’t just mind their own damn business, Zed thinks sourly. That Tannis woman being a prime example. She’s always got to be running her mouth, flaunting her education because, of course, hers is better than anyone else’s in the history of ever. He aims a kick at a piece of scrap, sending it straight into the open door of Marcus’s outlet. That woman is something else, that’s for sure – Zed wouldn’t mind her being some _where_ else. 

Orbit might be a good spot for her.

He’s still smarting from their last encounter, when Zed had come across her talking into an ECHO recorder about him. Apparently his ‘rustic and hare-brained mannerisms’ don’t meet with her approval, and she never seems to pass up an opportunity to mention how hairy his arms are or slip in the fact that she thinks he’s a Neanderthal. Whatever the hell _that_ is. It doesn’t even seem to matter that he’d patched her up after she’d invaded a skag den and attempted to steal one of the pups while the thing was nursing from its mother. Sometimes it just defies comprehension, how she’s managed to survive this long. It would’ve been better for everyone if Roland had just left her out in the Rust Commons.

It _definitely_ would have been better for Zed, that much is certain. She drives him up the wall with her fancy ways, and drives him to distraction with the rest of her – and there’s a lot to be distracted by. The worst thing is that sassy mouth, always opening with a statement specifically designed to stomp his self-esteem down into the dirt. Those lips (he often wishes they would somehow get stapled shut so she couldn’t talk for at least five blessed minutes) are full and pink, and it’s far too easy to imagine having them wrapped around his cock. Getting Patricia Tannis to shut up is a recurring fantasy for him, but that particular one gets dusted off only when he’s by himself and preferably somewhere when nobody can see him getting a hard-on.

While he prefers to focus on her mouth and his own desire to obtain her silence by any means available, Tannis’ other physical features aren’t bad at all. She’s got those big green eyes in a face that’s way past just being pretty, and what might it be like to see her eyes looking up at him as she’s sucking him off?

It’s far too easy to imagine _that_ , and Zed drops a hand down to adjust himself when his pants abruptly run out of room for his dick. He briefly considers just dropping trou and taking care of business before shaking his head. No, he didn’t come here for that, never mind that there’s nobody to see him if he _does_ do it. Besides, she takes up too much of his time as it is and he’ll be damned if he lets her influence what he does in his own _town_.

He sighs and puts his hands on his hips, looking around. There’s always so much to do, he never knows where to start; more often than not, this leads to him doing nothing at all because it’s impossible to choose. Today, Zed’s resolved to actually so _something_. He closes his eyes and spins in place a few times, determined that whatever he sees once he opens his eyes again will be his project; it’s a childish way of choosing and he knows it.

The first thing - _things_ , rather - he sees are the graves out by the old town gate. Zed sighs unhappily at this, but it _is_ something he’s put off doing for too long. “Might as well get it over with.” 

He’ll be out closer to the road than he’d like to be and even though things seem quiet at the moment, Zed knows better than to go out there without a weapon. He grabs an old SMG and digs around for a few tools before walking out and stopping to listen for anything suspicious. Once he’s satisfied that he won’t get jumped immediately, Zed starts picking up the trash that’s accumulated against the headstones. A few of the crosses need to be repaired so he does that, too, and carefully straightens everything.

Zed spends more time tending to his mother’s grave longer than the others and since it’s still so quiet and it seems like it’s been forever, he talks to her. “Hey, Momma. Sorry I ain’t been by for so long – things’ve gotten crazy out in Sanctuary.” He leans on the rake handle and laughs, shaking his head. “Hell, they’re crazy every-damned-where. Y’know? I still can’t get over Ned and those zombies. I know he was your favorite an’ all, but that dude is a certified _dumbass_. He’s all healed up, for the most part; nobody’s gonna go look for him in Jakob’s Cove after that mell of a hess he made, but he helps me out with the vendors now and again.”

He adjusts the tire hanging from her cross needlessly. “We got a new girl in Sanctuary, did I tell you? Annoys the piss outta me. Thinks she’s better ‘cause she got a _real_ doctorate, the little snob…but she’s just as pretty as can be. Reminds me of what you used t’say, that babies’re only cute so the parents don’t wanna kill ‘em on account of the trouble they cause,” Zed sighs. “You’d probably like her.” He finishes clearing her grave and sits down at the end of it, surveying his work – anyone else wouldn’t know that he even touched the place, let alone spent three hours cleaning everything up…but _he_ knows, and Zed guesses that’s all that matters.

The light’s starting to fade when he finally gets up and dusts himself off, feeling at peace now that he’s had a chance to air his grievances to someone who won’t judge him for it. 

Even if that person’s been dead for the past thirty years.

Zed doesn’t have enough time to start another of the projects that just seem to pile up the moment he’s not looking, so he grabs a roll of wire fencing and sets up a windbreak around the grave sites. Of course he runs short, so he’s forced to move things around until it looks halfway decent and will stop a majority of the junk blowing around the dunes from entering this particular side of town.

When he’s finished, Zed carries all the tools – and the gun – back to storage and starts hooking up the electric fence. It guards his building while he’s not there and serves as a handy light source when he _is_. Once he’s satisfied that any attempted invasions will end in a whole lot of pain and suffering, Zed gets the tiny camp stove going and starts warming up his dinner while he sweeps the living area.

He takes a seat atop one of the abandoned weapons chests he’d found just outside the gates and eats his food – leftover skag stew – while staring out at the mess that’s been made of Fyrestone. Correction: the mess that’s _being_ made here, since Hyperion seems to think he should move out to make room for the pipeline that’s being built. There’s also some construction starting up just past the motel, out by the section that’d been messed up by that crazy CL4P-TP unit calling itself INAC or whatever the hell.

Too bad that thing hadn’t turned Tannis into a robo-whatnot, instead of doing it to Ned. Maybe it wouldn’t make much difference, he thinks. 

“Nah,” Zed murmurs, taking another spoonful of stew. He knows that’s unfair and more than a little mean. All it really would have meant is that he’d need to ‘decircuit’ _her_ , and she might not have handled it nearly as well as Ned had. Zed still has nightmares about having to dig the circuitry out of his brother without the benefit of painkillers. 

There’s so much he still doesn’t know about her. He’s listened to the ECHO recording she’d left in his clinic for some reason, thinking it was a message for him, and was horrified by the matter-of-fact way she described her torture at Jack’s hands. She’s annoying as fuck, which is one of those universal truths some books like to talk about, but Zed wouldn’t actually _want_ something like that to happen to her.

A wistful daydream now and again about how to get her out of his hair doesn’t count, though, and he relies upon those for the sake of his own wellbeing.

Maybe he should ask her about it, see if she wants to talk it over with someone. Zed wonders how that conversation would go. Then he firmly reminds himself that he doesn’t care – he doesn’t even know her and he never will, so what’s the use?

He finishes his dinner and rinses out the container, tipping it over to dry, and goes to sweep up the sand that’s blown in by the vendor he’s too sentimental to unplug. 

Once he’s set the place to rights, Zed cleans his teeth and barricades himself inside the small living area so that he can sleep in relative safety. You never knew when someone might fuck up a breaker and short out the electric fence.

It’s still too warm to even consider wearing a shirt to bed, so he turns the lights off and lies down in nothing but an old pair of pajama pants. He’s feeling tired enough to fall asleep right away but sleep doesn’t seem to be in the cards for him at the moment.

A sudden thought makes him ball his hands into fists and punch the mattress irritably, because he really does need to go to sleep and now all he can think about is HER.

_Again._

Damn it!

“Leave me alone,” Zed groans, rubbing his palms over his face. He does _not_ need to start thinking of her lips again, or what she could be doing with them, but his body clearly has different ideas of how he should be handling it.

Zed sighs and kicks off his blankets, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness and wondering why his imagination has plagued him with this. He wouldn’t wish her upon his worst enemy…well, no, that’s a lie. He totally would, because Doc Mercy deserves it.

God, he wants her. He wants her so badly his bones ache. All her fancy talk, and even that doctorate, wouldn’t be of much use to her if Zed had her here now…not that he’d dream of forcing her. No, he’s never taken anyone to bed that hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place and he likes to think that he’d left them well satisfied.

He wouldn’t mind satisfying Patricia Tannis.

Zed slides his left foot up and lets his right leg fall to the side, closing his eyes briefly as he starts to get hard. He rubs a hand over his chest slowly, not wanting to touch his cock just yet because he’s put this off and wants to really _enjoy_ it. That means letting all the blood-based hydraulics do their work while he thinks about Tannis just a _little_ bit more.

He thinks about the time he’d seen her bent over while she rummaged through one of the old Dahl bins. God knows what she was scrounging for but the image of that pert, upturned bottom has stayed with him to warm more than a few lonely nights. Zed likes to imagine himself running his hands up her legs before reaching that sweet ass of hers. It’d be firm, yet soft at the same time – the kind of ass you could really sink your fingers into. Or teeth, if that’s your partner liked.

His hand moves down his stomach and dips past the waistline of his drawstring sleep pants, over to the crease of his right hip. Zed keeps the pressure light so that it’s almost ticklish and he shivers despite the heat. He’s not planning on doing anything about his attraction to her, other than jerking himself bloody over it, but all the same it’s nice to imagine something could happen between them. Ever since she’d shown up, Zed’s dreams have been decisively adolescent ones and he’s woken up more than once with a hard dick and a mess on his sheets. While he’s asleep, he can have her any number of ways…but the best dreams have always been when she’s had _him_.

He doesn’t remember every detail of the dreams, but sometimes he’ll be watching Tannis disrobe for a different type of medical examination than the ones he usually gives. Sometimes she’ll be the one watching _him_. The most persistent dream takes many variations, but it usually boils down to the fact that they’re out at one of her dig sites fucking each other into a coma. Zed blames his days of tomcatting around Fyrestone for this, since there’d never been much privacy to be had indoors.

She’d probably like it out there on top of her desk, he thinks, but his imagination shows him something else entirely – Tannis on all fours, squirming as Zed drops to his knees behind her. Running one hand up her back while the other gets Tab A lined up with Slot B. While she finally stops the snark and asks him _nicely_.

Zed groans and pushes his pants down roughly so that the waistband snags on his cock and makes it bounce back up towards his stomach, sending shivers of pleasure through him at the movement. The pants get kicked off onto the floor and he tucks one arm beneath his head, spreading his legs and reaching between them.

He gathers his balls into his hand and tugs, closing his eyes. Moxxi had issued a standing invitation to him years ago, but he has no plans to poison that particular well - no pun intended, but if the garter belt fits…. It _would_ be nice to have someone to scratch his itches with, though. Maybe he should stop by the Middle of Nowhere bounty board next time he’s out in the Rust Commons, just to see if Hudson Johns has any itches of his own. Zed curls his fingers around the base of his shaft and shakes his cock back and forth, exhaling slowly at how good it feels.

Alternating a few brisk shakes with sliding his fist up and down, Zed’s imagination is invaded by Patricia Tannis once again. In this scenario, they’re in the New Haven clinic and she’s pressed up behind him because… Zed opens his eyes and frowns up at the ceiling in thought. Maybe she’s trying to get a ‘sample’ from him because she wants to test it for some weird reason. “Yeah, that sounds like somethin’ she’d do,” Zed muses; it’s just strange enough that Tannis would do it and fucked up enough that he’d _like_ it.

Zed closes his eyes again and strokes faster, thinking of how it might be with Tannis plastered against his back and reaching around. He’d bet good money on her hands being soft…and a little bit cold. She’d probably be very businesslike about it, too, but it’s more fun to imagine her getting hot and bothered by what she was doing to him.

He moves his other hand down to play with his balls, pretending that she’s the one fondling him. Zed’s breathing roughens and it suddenly doesn’t matter how ridiculous the fantasy is because it’s definitely getting him there. Concentrating the friction on the head of his dick, Zed grinds his hips down into the old mattress as he feels the tension rising. And rising, and-

“ _Fuck_ ,” he groans out, stomach muscles tightening as he comes. His cock jerks repeatedly, still held within his fist, and Zed strokes his length firmly to draw out the last droplets that spatter his abdomen. When it becomes too uncomfortable to touch anymore, Zed releases his softening dick and lets it fall with a wet slap onto the mess he’s made. 

The back of his head hits the pillow and he breathes in deeply, savoring the heavy warmth of pleasure settling throughout his body. Zed wipes his palms on the blankets caught beneath him and thinks about reaching for a towel, or whatever he’s got lying around to clean himself up with, but ultimately decides to just stay where he is and let it dry on its own. He’s due for a shower, anyway.

He’s nearly asleep when his ECHO comes alive with an ear-splitting burst of static that startles him back into wakefulness. “What in the fresh _hell_ ,” Zed says irritably, lifting one hand to press it over his heart. His pulse is racing thanks to the unwelcome surprise and he fumbles around until he’s finally gotten a hold on the offending device. “What d’you want?”

It quickly becomes clear that he’s just barked at Moxxi and she does _not_ appreciate his tone. She also needs him to come back to Sanctuary right away because there’s been a brawl at her bar and several people have been badly injured.

Oh, and there’s a problem with the shield generator again so would he kindly get his ass back to his clinic before Hyperion decides to fire off some mortars and the _rest_ of her customers die?

Zed rubs at his eyes before he remembers that he should wash his hands first. “Moxx, it’s the middle of the goddamn _night_ -” He’s interrupted by another burst of static, which means that she’s already signed off. “ _Damn_ it!”

Well, his afterglow’s already been shot to shit…so he might as well go.

It’ll be too much trouble to drive back this late, not to mention the fact that if people are in need of medical attention then there’s no time to waste. Zed swings his legs off of the bed and grabs his clothing so that he can get dressed, only pausing to wipe himself off.

The Fast Travel seems to be working today. He’s not a religious man, but every time he uses the ancient thing Zed offers up a quick prayer beforehand just in case. He’s digistructed into Pierce Station and it looks like he’s not missing any parts when he gives himself a hasty pat down, so he chalks it up to a win.

Zed walks across the open area, maneuvering past a few drunks to get through the passage leading to his clinic, and starts digging in his pockets for the keys. “Why does the sign declare that this is a ‘24/7 clinic’ when you are obviously missing for half that amount of time?” A voice asks, and something inside Zed curls up and dies a horrible death upon realizing exactly who is standing behind him. “Well?” Patricia Tannis demands. There’s a clicking sound, which he identifies as coming from her ECHO; looks like she’s been recording her verbal diarrhea again.

“Vendors’re always on,” Zed grunts, finally locating the keys and trying not to fumble them in front of her. Because he’s _in front of her_ , just like in that fantasy of his that he’d enjoyed so much about ten minutes ago. “That’s why.”

“It’s ridiculous and misleading. No _actual_ doctor-”

Oh, here she goes again. Zed tunes her out through force of habit as he sorts through the key ring until he finds the one he needs. Then he unlocks the door and, slipping inside, closes it right in her face. She and her damned ECHO device can go hang, for all he cares, and soon enough he’ll find something else to get excited about in the privacy of his own home.

It’s not as if he’s actually _interested_ in her.


End file.
